


overnight

by renaissance



Series: Pynch Week 2016 [3]
Category: Raven Cycle - Maggie Stiefvater
Genre: Future Fic, Long-Distance Relationship, M/M, Reverse Chronology, Texting
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-08-15
Updated: 2016-08-15
Packaged: 2018-08-08 22:57:00
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,734
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7776949
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/renaissance/pseuds/renaissance
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              
<p></p><blockquote>
  <p>
    <i>Time starts to lose meaning in summer. It’s always this way, the hours dismantling themselves in the time between—although now there’s nothing after, that’s it for formal education. It’s freeing, and that’s why Ronan stays up until half-past-two, lying in the grass until his neck is stiff from craning it up to look at his phone.</i>
  </p>
</blockquote><br/>Pynch Week day 3 – Lonely Nights
            </blockquote>





	overnight

**Author's Note:**

> I wanted to do something shorter and less involved today but then for some reason I thought it would be a great idea to write a reverse-chronological texting fic so here we are. This is super experimental so enjoy?! Thank you to Mandy for looking over this!

> (06:29) what’s your day looking like?

The first hint of the morning comes through a crack in the curtains—it gets light too early in summer, and Adam always wakes with the sun. It’s not yet seven and he has nothing to do except lie quietly, hands folded over his stomach, while he waits for his alarm to go off. When he’s _supposed_ to get up. Time starts to lose meaning in summer. It’s only Connecticut, but it’s lighter for so much longer in summer. Winter will be worse.

At least summer is cooler here, not like the way Henrietta swelters and clings to your skin. Adam is adjusting quickly. It’s not home—maybe, not yet—but there’s something about it that’s so full of promise. The stacks of notebooks by Adam’s bed, the printed notes already covered in scribbles and highlighting. College life suits him. His phone, sitting atop his notes on linear algebra—

> (06:28) I am now

Henrietta burns but the Barns are outside time, outside space. Here, it’s always spring, always fall, always the seasons in between the extremes. Ronan is woken by the cows, sometimes; by Adam, other times. It’s like Adam doesn’t sleep—well, that’s a college thing, right? Too much work and not enough sleep. But Adam breathes that sort of thing like fresh air. He’s the flower that blossoms in the hothouse. Ronan tries not to let it worry him, because life’s too short to worry, about anything—but he knows he does it anyway.

It’s still a little dark outside; Ronan can tell it’s already hot, though. He doesn’t want to get up. He’s adjusting. He misses Adam. He says it out loud. He misses _everyone_ , off to see the world without him. But that’s. That’s not his problem. This is what Ronan wants—it is, more than anything else.

He just didn’t realise how sudden it would be.

> (06:27) you up?

Ronan doesn’t respond. He must be sleeping.

Adam wakes a lot during the night. He doesn’t mean to. He doesn’t even go to bed late.

There are lights outside the college and Adam’s room faces out onto the main walkway. Trees along the walkway catch on the beams and turn into shadows, brushing across the back of the curtains and scattering over the carpet. First year optics—refraction, diffraction. Adam thinks about light a lot.

He wakes at three and four and then five, and he texts Ronan again, because that’s all he can do without making too much noise.

> (05:15) i hope your phones on silent
> 
> (05:15) ronan
> 
> (05:14) hey

Time starts to lose meaning in summer. It’s always this way, the hours dismantling themselves in the time between—although now there’s nothing after, that’s _it_ for formal education. It’s freeing, and that’s why Ronan stays up until half-past-two, lying in the grass until his neck is stiff from craning it up to look at his phone. He walks back to the main house disoriented, blinking in the sudden darkness.

It’s still so hot. He doesn’t sleep yet. Fitfully. It takes time. He wakes at three, and then four, and he thinks about texting Adam, but he doesn’t want to seem too—too what? Desperate? Dependent? Adam knows how he feels. Can you even come on too strong to someone when they’ve already seen you at your worst?

Ronan never used to text before this. Now his thumbs are the proud owners of the strongest muscles in his body. He really misses Adam.

> (02:33) night ronan x  
>   
> 
> 
> (02:31) I’m getting tired. Calling it a night. Speak to you tomorrow

They talk about anything, nothing. Adam hides under the covers and builds himself an impregnable fortress, high walls of sheet around his head and his phone glowing at the centre. He watches the way the light shifts with him as his sheet creases, shifts himself in and out of sleep, his eyes closing until his phone buzzes, sending jolts of alertness through him.

Tonight is quite. Most nights there’s a party somewhere in the college, drunk students making a racket in the corridors or outside the window—firmly shut—and music, always music. Or the boys across the corridor up late watching sport—Adam doesn’t see the appeal, and he resents the noise. Now, though, it’s like he’s been given a reprieve, and he can focus, really focus, on Ronan.

It’s been a while since he did that.

> (01:37) haha no gave up on that a while ago  
>   
> 
> 
> (01:36) For real, Parrish, are you still studying?

There’s something gnawing at Ronan—it comes back every time they do this, text each other more than incidentally, for any amount of time, with any emotional gravity. He doesn’t struggle to name it, but he’s not going to articulate it either.

It’s winning, though, whatever he calls it. It’s getting to him, and he’s close to just getting in his car and driving all the way up the coast, in the pitch-dark night, in the heat. Insane, and in love. He doesn’t have the energy to be embarrassed by himself. But at the same time, he’s so aware.

He thinks of calling. Adam doesn’t like phone calls, though. Said if he wanted to be Gansey he’d buy a pair of boat shoes and be done with it. They’d laughed at that. And Ronan had promised to limit phone calls to at least once a week, at least until Skype was working. He tries not to regret that.

> (01:02) lights out now

Adam only turns the light off at one. He studies with Broadway until midnight because Latin is the kind of class you only pass if you cross-check your translations with other people, and then Broadway spends an hour on a philosophy essay while Adam alternates between struggling with a matrix inversion and texting Ronan.

Ronan is distracting. Adam keeps looking away from his maths and when he comes back to it he can’t remember if he wrote down his last row operation or not. It’s slow going. But he tells himself he’ll study closer to the test. Or when Ronan’s asleep.

He looks back down at his half-hearted maths and finds that he’s written “Ronan” instead of “Row 1.” He goes back to texting, deletes a draft. Writes another draft, deletes that too. Numbers are easier than words, and words distract from numbers. He almost laughs aloud.

> (23:16) Never  
>   
> 
> 
> (23:14) guess im pretty boring huh
> 
> (23:14) still studying

The places they’d been before they all scattered—Ronan thinks about that sometimes. He thinks about Cabeswater more than anything else, and he might as well, since he’s trying to rebuild it from root to leaf. He thinks about the caves. It freaks him out that he won’t be able to get into them without going back to the Dittley house, or to where Cabeswater was. It freaks him out more that there might be another way. He doesn’t—he doesn’t want to think about it.

It’s definitely mellow, different, in a good way. He doesn’t have as many nightmares anymore. Instead he dreams about Adam and he dreams _for_ Adam. Maybe he should start dreaming for himself too, but it helps to have something, someone else, to focus on.

St. Agnes’ is sold—when Adam comes back he’ll stay at the Barns, and he’ll find his room full of souvenirs from a work in progress. Cabeswater. Eventually.

> (20:06) I mean c a l l a
> 
> (20:05) Well blue says she’s doing fine. I see her around town but I don’t go to Fox Way really I think Carla still hates me  
>   
> 
> 
> (20:00) and maura?

He gets back to his dorm and settles in for the night. _Settling_ is a funny word. It implies security, stability—new currency for Adam. He’s still converting from his old denomination of nerves, tension, constant, constant, constant anxiety. In another lifetime he was the human conduit of a dream forest. Persephone’s tarot cards—Adam’s cards, now, his inheritance, sit on his desk, just under the window. He takes them out sometimes, mostly when he’s alone, and turns them over, tries to feel the meaning. Interpreting this language is harder than it used to be, but if he can take Latin and do just as well as the of the classics majors, then he can do this.

Before Broadway gets back, Adam takes a quick reading. The first card he turns over stares back at him as a reminder.

_Magician_.

He will adjust.

> (18:59) just saying hi
> 
> (18:59) ah nothing

Ronan wouldn’t say it aloud but the highlight of his day—or highlights, plural, because it happens a lot. Whenever Adam has a break between class, whenever he gets bored, whenever something funny comes up in Latin. Ronan hangs off the edge of those moments.

The sun is low in the sky over the Barns, and Ronan’s done nothing all day. He can’t say that to Adam, though. Adam does everything, all the time. Adam is busy the way a Persian carpet is busy, intricate and ingenious. And Ronan misses his face. He’s been trying to install Skype on his computer, but it keeps freezing—his computer is not very good. He could dream himself a new one. Dream himself a way to see Adam whenever he wants. But that would feel like cheating. They’re doing distance, and they’re going to do it the old-fashioned way.

> (18:58) Yea I’m here what’s up

On the way back the trees are silhouetted black by the sunset, flattened by their own shadow, and the sky a gradient behind them, painted orange to pale blue, speckled with planes and the first stars. Campus goes quiet when the stars come out, as everyone retreats home or to their dorm or to the library to study.

That’s when Adam’s day begins. He nearly gets lost on the way home from an early dinner with some of his new friends from physics lab—the long route isn’t so bad. His hair’s grown a little long, and a half-hearted fringe sticks to his forehead. He can feel a headache coming on. Certainly not the right mood for staring at a tiny screen all night.

But Adam will do all sorts of ridiculous things for Ronan.

> (18:29) hey are you around

**Author's Note:**

> Please leave a comment!
> 
> (Maybe the adventures of Adam Parrish and Henry Broadway Roommates Extraordinaire will be elaborated one day but for now you can trust that I haven't just stuck him in there as a random name and I actually do have about five novels worth of headcanon that didn't make it into this fic for a variety of reasons)


End file.
